Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geology/Periods

Subperiods

I've been making progress in bringing all articles to use a consistent format, and have been thinking about subperiods. These all have their own page, most of which have practically no information on; it seems to me that it would be better to combine all information about subperiods into the article of the main period to provide a sense of sucession, and to avoid having lots of practically empty pages. There may be a case for some action-packed sub-periods, especially those of the Tertiary, to have a page to themselves, but in the majority I don't think there'll ever be enough interest or content to make individual articles justifiable. Comments?

Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 19:22, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

Why are stages/ages not worth own articles?

Copied in from User:Smith609

Hi, I see you're deleting the content of articles about stages/ages for some time now, redirecting those pages to pages about the period/system. I think these names are encyclopedic enough to have their own articles. If not so much as periods of time, then as units in (often local) stratigraphy, paleontology and regional geology. It seems to me a waste of time for the reader to give their complete descriptions in the article of the period itself, a mere mentioning of the different systems of subdivision in use/used would be enough there. I agree btw that these articles are often incomplete and not very useful, but Tommotian for example contained good information that is now lost for the reader. Please also see my earlier comments on the bad state of the stratigraphic section in this Wikipedia. Regards, Woodwalker (talk) 12:13, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Glad that someone else is expressing interest in this area! I feel that the Mesozoic periods probably contain enough information to merit remaining as individual articles, although I echo your comments that a full list of taxa is a bad idea. But in the Palaeozoic we simply don't have the resolution to say anything informative about sub-periods. Evolutionary trends, climate change, and plate tectonics operate, on the whole, on a period-level time scale. My vision is to have a thorough discussion on how things changed through each period, which may even be broken down on a sub-period by sub-period level within the article; that way there is context for the information and duplication is minimised. If somebody wants to know what is going on in the Ordovician they don't want to have to trawl through a dozen overlapping subperiod pages. The Tommotian was one of the better articles, I'll grant you, but it contained unsourced statements about the palaeogeography which is in fact very poorly constrained throughout the whole Cambrian, and another unsourced section which attempted to sum up the Cambrian explosion and small shelly fauna - themes which are more relevant to the Cambrian article and better covered there. There may, eventually, be cause to create articles on late/middle/early sections of periods, but wanting an article on every faunal stage seems like demanding an article on each chapter of a novel. Further, because stages overlap, I feel that a table like the one in Cambrian is far more useful than 50 pages consisting of little more than a list of start and end dates and preceding periods, and perhaps a bit of unreferenced, poorly maintained and duplicated material; the table makes it very easy to place each faunal stage in the context of the whole article. I think that focussing our attention on improving the period level articles should be our focus for now; sub-periods act as a (vast) distraction. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 15:07, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Hi Martin, thanks for your reply. I am glad too, when nobody reacted I thought I was the only one who cared, until I found this period-project. You are right: we don't want to have too many articles that simply give the same information. I agree with you that our main concern should lie with the periods. And man, they are still messy... the task is huge.

I think the ages could eventually all have their own articles, but not because of Earth history. Like you, I see no point in copying information about paleogeography or paleontology to the stages' articles. When these articles only contain information on such subjects, I don't care if they are made into redirects. But when they would contain information about research history, stratigraphic definitions, rock formations of that specific age, etc. (I feel that's what they should do, since the articles about periods are simply too general for that...) they give the reader some background and would be a worthy addition. This one contained some (basic) information on American lithostratigraphy and could have stayed as a stub. So my proposal would be to only keep those articles when they have specialistic information on stratigraphy (weather bio-, litho-, magneto-, or chrono-) or their research history. When they have information on Earth history (paleogeography, paleoclimate, paleontology/evolution, etc) that information can be moved to the periods, maybe except for some obvious things (the Messinian Salinity Crisis can be briefly mentioned at Messinian etc). On the other hand, I see no reason to have articles on the epochs with names like "Late Cretaceous" or "Early Ordovician". They seem to me artificial inventions of the ICS/IUGS.

I am not totally sure about having huge tables with many subdivions in them in every article about a period/system. When there are ten different systems of subdividing the period they get large so they may ruin the layout and disrupt the text too much(?) All these stratigraphic units are maybe just a bit too specialistic to mention in the article about the period.

About the Cenozoic periods: because they are less known than their subdivisions, and there is a lot to write about the epochs, I rather feel the focus for the last 65 mya could better be with the epochs: Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene and Holocene. If you agree we could add them to the table at the project page.

About the table: When a subject is not yet mentioned at all, I filled in "stub". I am not sure what to do with "Events". Certainly not all periods had asteroid impacts, what else could not be covered in the other subjects? Woodwalker (talk) 16:50, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

New stub type relevant to this project

Hi all - thought i'd give you the heads-up that a new stub type has been created relevant to this project: {{Palaeogeography-stub}} (with redirects from botht he US spelling and from palaeo-geo-stub). This is for historical/prehistoric geographical features and locations, e.g., Wealden Lake, Zealandia. Hope it is useful to you.

BTW, there seems to be a mismatch between the name of the parent article (Palaeogeography), and its category (Category:Paleogeography) which you might wish to discuss. The stub category has been made with a name to agree with the article - if this is incorrect, please propose it for renaming at WP:SFD.

Cheers, Grutness...wha? 00:57, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Re-visiting Periods

I note that there has only been one contribution here in the past 18 months. It's a pity as there would still seem to be a lot of work to do getting the articles on geologic(al) periods into better shape. I am constantly irked by the scrappy nature of the Carboniferous article in particular. Looking at the Phanerozoic periods there seems to be some measure of consistency through the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic though not in the Cenozoic where, perhaps reasonably given their proximity in time to the present, the emphasis is on the epochs or indeed the series. There are sections on subdivisions, climate, (palaeo)geography and life in each of the periods concerned though beyond that there is less consistency. Extinction events are attended to in differing ways whilst sea level gets a subsection to itself in some and not in others. Life is subdivided differently from one to another - understandable to some degree as there is more to say in certain periods than others as regards marine or terrestrial life, fauna or flora. That said some more consistency would improve the quality of this important family of articles.

Palaeogeography could do with more attention and a more global perspective taken as regards certain periods - the Carboniferous has been identified as too Americo-centric though it needs informed editors to redress these imbalances.

The listing of subdivisions within the body of the article, especially where there are large numbers of these (as (again) in the Carboniferous and in the Ordovician), serves to break the flow of the article and gives it a messy appearance. They might better be confined to tables except where there is discussion of them.

What do others think? I note that attempts - at least partially sucessful have been made in the past to improve these articles as a whole and those responsible are to be commended. Is it perhaps time for another push though?

cheers Geopersona (talk) 20:44, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Project banner

I have added this task force to the {{WikiProject Geology}} banner. See WP:WikiProject Geology/Periods#Project banner. I have added the tag to all of the geological periods, including several that are missing from the table in WP:WikiProject Geology/Periods. These are now all classified in subcategories of Category:Geological periods articles. RockMagnetist (talk) 18:29, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Jurassic page and template of time is correct?

But basically the banner got edit and then put back together. Not sure if it is correct, but the Jurassic was missing it as it was removed. And the Template:Jurassic_graphical_timeline is back as best I can see. But not sure if the markers are correct. Thanks, Marasama (talk) 09:33, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Cryogenian infobox out of date

The timescale of the Cryogenian has been changed, see [1], so the infobox is out of date. Can someone who knows what they are doing fix this. Dudley Miles (talk) 14:43, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Aligning periods with authoritative sources

I am not a geologist, but recently have had occasion to make extensive use of data from the major sources of dating information (esp. the British Geological Survey). Occasionally, I've spotted discrepancies between the date range given in the Wikipedia and that available from these sources, and have twice made a change in a Wikipedia stub to nudge the entry closer to the current standard. (Both cited the BGS entry.) Because I'm not a geologist, someone in the field should know about these changes.

This post is occasioned by a change to the stub for "Cambridge Greensand", which had labeled it "Early Cretaceous". The BGS pronounced it "Cenomanian", making it early Late Cretaceous. My change was to "Middle to Late Cretaceous", a safe enough change, I'd thought, but the stub had links to category pages and unfortunately needed further adjustment (pointing to "Late Cretaceous" instead of "Early Cretaceous Series of Europe"). The Cambridge Greensand is no doubt far down on the list of stubs to address, but there has apparently been some discussion about the Albian/Cenomanian boundary, and a paleogeologist could provide a full discussion of the problem.

A more general question is whether or not the date ranges in stubs should be adjusted to conform to current standards (as set by the BGS, USGS, etc.).

Wavery2 (talk) 15:12, 8 April 2018 (UTC)Wavery2

Dating of the PTB

Several articles (Permian, Triassic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic) present the dating of the Permian–Triassic boundary as 251.902 Mya. Is that precision reasonable? The Subcommission on Permian Stratigraphy of the International Commission on Stratigraphy uses the dating 251.902 ± 0.024 Mya. I think this may be based on: Seth D. Burgess, Samuel Bowring, and Shu-zhong Shen (April 1, 2014). "High-precision timeline for Earth's most severe extinction". PNAS. 111 (9): 3316–3321. doi:10.1073/pnas.1317692111.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) The size of the measurement uncertainty does not warrant a presentation with three digits after the decimal point without uncertainty interval. Also, this is only one of several high-precision datings mentioned in the article, another one being 251.950 ± 0.042 Mya. By the way, "Permian–Triassic boundary" is a redlink, and "Permian-Triassic boundary" with a hyphen redirects to the article Permian–Triassic extinction event, but the latter mentions neither the term "Permian-Triassic boundary" nor the abbreviation "PTB".  --Lambiam 10:29, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Creating a template for the geological stages (as defined by the ICS)

I noticed a few weeks ago that for the eras, eons, and periods, their pages had a template in the upper right-hand corner. the template included a timeline, among other aspects, and made the pages look more official. However, the epochs and ages didn't have such a system, and instead had a grid template that showed all the subdivisions of a given period. I probably should have asked before doing this, but I created and added 'geological epoch' templates to each of the epoch pages, which I though made the pages appear more uniform (example:Quaternary). However, I've stopped making new templates temporarily to ask a question: is it okay to create a geological stage template (as in, create a template specifically for stages defined by the ics, which would go on their articles in the upper right-hand corner.)? Also, I'm thinking about removing the table-like templates that were on the epoch and stage pages before I started adding my geological epoch templates or possibly placing them in the 'subdivisions' sections of these articles. (example: Template:Quaternary (period))(they might be useful if they were put in the 'subdivisions' sections of these pages). thoughts? Does what I'm saying make sense? by Benniboi01 (talk • contribs) 18:25, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Timeline colors

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I've been toying with some timeline colors. Some of these letters are hard to read, especially the T. My mobile uses slightly different colors and makes it harder (See this screenshot). I came across the CGMW's color palette (Downloadable here), then I played around with some templates and did this:

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Do we like this change? The new {{User:JavaRogers/Template:Period font color}} could be implemented into any of these colored timelines. (See User:JavaRogers for the changes.) ——JavaRogers (talk) 22:55, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

Carboniferous

I've upgraded sections of the Carboniferous to A, but as I wrote these others may disagree! Silica Cat (talk) 16:43 14 March 2024 (UTC)